Transgender commentator Julia Malott says she opposes compulsory gender pronoun use and believes it isn’t good for trans people to deny their biological sex.
In an interview with True North, Malott explained that while she “unapologetically will use the pronouns that people want me to use for them because I understand how that can feel good…. and mostly I want to respect people, [but] doesn’t mean I’m comfortable mandating it for somebody else.”
Malott is a transgender woman from Toronto who is concerned about the state of politics surrounding gender identity and ideology.
She has a blog called Alotta Thoughts where she shares her perspectives about various transgender issues. She has also spoken at school board meetings and attended protests against the teaching of gender ideology in schools.
“It’s not illegal to be a jerk. It’s just maybe not gonna make you a lot of friends,” said Malott.
Malott explained in a recent YouTube video that “when someone experiences gender dysphoria and undergoes transition, they’re looking to be identified as their affirmed gender rather than their biological sex.” However, she believes “finding your affirmation from pronouns is not a good or healthy thing.”
“When I first transitioned, I received ‘she/her’ from everyone in my friendship circles. These were kind and loving people who wanted to support me in my transition. That being said, they would slip up and call me ‘he/him’ from time to time. Why? Because my voice was low, because I’m tall and have some masculine facial features, and because quite honestly, in many cases, they had known me as Jason for many years prior and were suddenly expected to switch to identifying me with a new set of pronouns and name.”
As for those who deliberately choose to use the opposite pronouns, Malott told True North she would rather have a conversation with them rather than get really upset over the matter.
“What I’ve found is that taking that position means I basically never get ‘he/him’ because people, for the most part, aren’t jerks.”
“Even people in this gender critical space, they’re concerned about being compelled. And when I come along and say, ‘look what you feel and what you want matters too, let’s just do what you’re comfortable with,’ almost always, people call me ‘she/her’ because they don’t feel like they’re denying reality.”
There was, however, a time when Malott did not think this way, and would get really upset when people referred to her by the wrong pronouns.
Being called by the wrong pronoun “might throw me into a cycle for a few days where I’d be emotionally thrown off. I wouldn’t want to go and see that person anymore or chat with that person because I was uncomfortable with them,” she explained.
But thanks to the help of a life coach, she came to realize that she was denying biological reality.
“I wanted to be female, and at this point I was imagining that I was. I had created this facade (where) I am female, just like all the other women.”
“I realized how easy it was to just construct this differently for myself and say, ‘I am biologically male, and people are gonna see that, and that doesn’t mean that they dislike me, that just means that they see that.’”
“Thus, I don’t need to be bothered by that.”
A recent poll conducted by Redfield and Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek found that almost half of U.S. millennials believe that not referring to someone by their preferred gender pronouns should be made a criminal offense.
In Canada, the Ontario Human Rights Code gives protection to gender pronouns, and several publicly funded colleges and universities consider not respecting pronouns to be a violation of human rights policy or a form of harassment – as previously reported by True North.
Activists have also claimed that biological science rejects the “sex binary” and that biological sex is being used by people to “justify transphobia.”
A recent public opinion poll shows that Canadians think Justin Trudeau is the worst PM in the last 55 years. Thirty per cent of respondents – similar to his share of electoral support in the last election – placed Trudeau as the worst prime minister. Trudeau now holds two unwanted titles – winning the slimmest share of electoral support in Canadian history and now being voted as the worst PM in recent history.
If ever there was a way of gauging your performance on the job…
This news won’t come as a surprise for Trudeau or his staff. Everywhere he goes, he is greeted by a wall of protesters heckling him and booing him. Last week he was chased out of Belleville and the week before that, he was mercilessly booed by Indigenous athletes at the start of Indigenous summer games.
Tune in to the latest episode of Ratio’d with Harrison Faulkner!
Billions of dollars of public funds have been spent in recent years to compensate for alleged injustices committed in the past or to dramatically improve the present life chances of downtrodden Indigenous people.
According to Tom Flanagan, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Distinguished Fellow, School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, governments have paid what could rightly be called “reparations” to Indian Bands for almost two decades under the misleading heading of Reconciliation. “Call it reparations by stealth,” he has opined.
This has included almost $5 billion in individual payments to those who attended Indian Residential Schools and $43.3 billion for children on reserves taken into foster care by welfare authorities.
Flanagan has pointed out the cost of claims approved thus far is $27.8 billion in individual payments, $31.9 billion for collective payments to improve local services, for a total of almost $60 billion. Claims now in progress will add significantly to these sums.
Going forward, the 2022 federal budget promised “to invest an additional $11 billion over six years to continue to support Indigenous children and families, and to help Indigenous communities continue to grow and shape their futures.”
Judging from previous spending, most of this money will have little positive impact on either “reconciliation” (reparation) for past errors or hastening socio-economic equality with non-Indigenous Canadians.
According to a damning report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer released in May, there is a huge disconnect between the government’s aspirations and the sums spent, on the one hand, and the actual consequences, on the other.
The PBO’s report on Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and Indigenous Services Canada summarized the situation as follows: “The increased spending did not result in a commensurate improvement in the ability of these organizations to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves. Based on the qualitative review the ability to achieve the targets specified has declined.”
According to Ken Coates, distinguished fellow and director of the Indigenous Affairs program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan:
“Canadians have become numb to reading about public expenditures on Indigenous peoples.… If Canada spends billions on Indigenous affairs, it must mean that we care deeply about First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. But it does nothing of the sort. While headlines emphasize dollar amounts, the statistics that tell the actual story of Indigenous well-being — around employment, health, housing conditions, suicide rates, violence and imprisonment, language, cultural revitalization — are much more sombre. When spending vast sums fails to make a substantial difference in many communities, the federal response is too often to double down and spend even more, in the absence of understanding what actually works to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples.”
The net effect of these failures within a national comparative perspective is that indigenous people on- and off-reserve continue to exhibit the highest rates of criminal behaviour and incarceration; the lowest incomes; the highest rates of unemployment, non-working population numbers, poverty, welfare dependency, alcohol and other drug addiction, and homelessness; the poorest housing; the highest rates of infant mortality; the lowest life expectancy; the highest disease and illness rates; the highest rates of suicides; the highest school dropout levels; the highest rates of child apprehension, fostering, and adoption; the highest levels of suicide and the highest rates of sexual abuse, the latter often fomented by the former; the highest rates of murdered and missing women; and the highest levels of drug overdoses.
Cat Lake Indian Reserve, a fly-in island community of just under 500 people in northern Ontario presents a typical case study of indigenous adversities.
The reserve has around 180 active registered participants in its opioid addiction programme, 36% of total population, according to Chief Russell Wesley.
As for housing, it’s not uncommon to have multiple families of up to 15 people, living in a home the size of a typical three-bedroom apartment. There are also significant health impacts associated with overcrowding, a leading cause of mould in homes. In 2019, more than three-quarters of the community’s housing was deemed unfit. A hundred children — almost half of those in the community — were diagnosed with respiratory diseases linked to black mould.
A family in the First Nations community of Pikangikum in northwestern Ontario. (Coleen Rajotte/CBC)
Like many other northern reserves, Cat Lake is impoverished. The average annual income in 2020 was $29,600 per person, a low figure given the high cost of living, with food and gas prices among the highest in Canada. The only store in town is run by the remnants of the historical North West Company, created in 1668.
Given its small size and isolation, the store charges more than $10 for a box of pasta and $9 for a litre of orange juice. A bag of salad is $11, and other fresh fruits and vegetables are akin to luxury items.
Families hunt and fish to augment food supplies and depend on a school nutrition programme, which provides fresh fruit and vegetables to hungry students.
Several themes emerge from these and other communities like them.
The overriding one is the deeply entrenched local-level assertion rooted in national narratives that colonial oppression and the long-gone residential school system are the source extant community adversity. All blame for current socio-economic problems, according to the prevailing narrative based on established wisdom, lies external to the depressed local communities or the lives of its residents. There is no grass-roots discussion of the ills of welfare dependency and little about the downside of federal government paternalism. Nor is there any challenge of how the debilitating norms and attitudes that prevail today regarding family life, self-reliance, personal responsibility, free will, and community cohesion, might be reformed from within.
Instead, well-meaning leaders like Chief Wesley always fall back on the same trope – “Residential school trauma introduces intergenerational trauma” – to explain all local social evils, including the underuse of the reserve’s adult education centre: “Chief Wesley said he’s brought in dozens of online education opportunities through partnerships with colleges, and yet, the centre sits empty due to low registration.”
It is also claimed that the already massive spending by the federal and provincial governments on Indian Band health and welfare, is simply not enough. The underlying assumption is that things would be different if only the government would be more forthcoming with dollars, billions more of them, in fact.
But there is never a whisper that the emperor has no clothes: how is it possible to achieve anything close to self-reliance, let alone widespread economic and social development, under an existing regime of 634 Indian Bands claiming to be “First Nations” when they are divided into over 3,000 reserves, most of them miniscule in size, scattered across a country with the world’s second largest land size.
Instead, Chief Wesley and his band council, like most of their counterparts across Canada, with the active encouragement of the federal government, are focused on restoring “old values through cultural and land-based programs that teach Anishinaabe culture, language and practices on the land, such as how to hunt and fish and clean the animals,” a naively sentimental socio-economic dead end if there ever was one. Meanwhile, only one in five working-age adults over 24 in Cat Lake has a high school diploma, according to Statistics Canada’s 2021 census, in a community with an 80% school dropout rate.
Instead of trying to improve school outcomes to meet Canada’s employment needs, the community has adopted “Land-based programs … modelled after ancestral teachings around hunting, trapping, fishing, and harvesting. They take ancestral land practices and infuse them with Anishinaabe language and spirituality. In Cat Lake, small-scale versions of these programs have taken place, with some students going out with the community’s land-based expert to learn how to trap and clean a rabbit.”
The band also wants “to open community-run shops, like a co-op and coffee shop, to compete with the Northern Store’s monopoly. They want to build a daycare centre, expand the school and partner with industry on resource development.”
All these cultural, social, and economic initiatives on an island lacking the inherent economic opportunities that would allow support of new business ventures would require large amounts of government funding with little prospect that they would lead to long-term economic growth.
The current Prime Minister’s father recognized that the reserve system operating under the framework of the apartheid Indian Act was both economically maladaptive and contrary the ideal of citizen equality. In his 1969 “White Paper,” Pierre Elliot Trudeau called for the step-by-step abolishment of the Indian Act and dismantling of the reserves (“ghettos,” as he called them):
“We have set the Indians apart as a race. We’ve set them apart in our laws…They are wards of the federal government …. I think that in a given society one section of the society cannot have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must be all equal under the laws and we must not sign treaties amongst ourselves…. this is the only basis on which I see our society can develop as equals.”
Trudeau viewed the abolition of separate Treaty Indian status as necessary to aboriginal future well-being and prosperity. Indigenous organizations, preoccupied as they still are today with their own narrow interests and privileges, vehemently objected so vociferously that Trudeau was forced to abandon his efforts to legislate an end to indigenous exceptionalism.
The terrible legacy of that retreat has continued to plague all Canadians, especially indigenous ones, to the present day.
Pim Wiebel worked for over three decades in indigenous community development and refugee resettlement and is a former Indian Residential School teacher.
On Monday, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault released the Liberal government’s framework to end public funding for the oil and gas sector based on a number of criteria.
The government’s framework comes as some argue that Canada does not subsidize oil and gas companies.
The framework claims to deliver on a major climate milestone first pledged by G20 leaders at the 2009 summit to phase out “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”
According to the Liberal government, a fossil fuel subsidy is determined to be “inefficient” should it disproportionately benefit the oil and gas industry and if it meets the World Trade Organization (WTO) definition of a subsidy.
The WTO defines a “subsidy” as a “financial contribution by a government or any public body within the territory of a member which confers a benefit.”
The Macdonald Laurier Institute’s Senior Fellow and Director of the Energy, Environment and Natural Resource Program, Heather Exner-Pirot, told True North that the government’s definition was overall a “balanced framework.”
“In general, this a balanced framework that rejects some of the most ideological approaches to defining fossil fuel subsidies advanced by eNGOs, such as disallowing supports that support remote communities to access affordable energy,” said Exner-Pirot in an emailed statement.
However, some have not taken kindly to the federal government’s proposal. Last week, Conservative Energy Critic MP Shannon Stubbs argued that any proposed regulation by the Liberal government would harm the viability of hundreds of thousands of jobs and that Ottawa failed to provide any viable definition of what an “inefficient subsidy” means.
True North reached out to Stubbs’ office to get her reaction to today’s framework but did not receive a response by the deadline given.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers also hit back at the federal government, saying that tax deductions did not meet the definition of subsidies.
Guilbeault’s announcement also laid out a series of exemptions for the framework, including supporting Indigenous economic participation in fossil fuels.
“The fact that they explicitly mention they can support Indigenous participation in fossil fuel activities is very positive as that industry has been a huge driver of economic reconciliation. It also sets the stage for a national loan guarantee program to support oil and gas projects, whereas the Canadian Infrastructure Bank currently excludes such opportunities,” said Exner-Pirot.
Canadians worried about the loss of liberty and the kind of values being passed onto kids today may be “intolerant,” according to a recent poll commissioned by the Liberal government.
The Attitudes, Awareness and Behaviours Surrounding 2SLGBTQI+ Communities in Canada Abacus Data survey was prepared for Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) and cost taxpayers $60,359.52.
According to the poll, a majority of Canadians were worried about what kids were learning and held “libertarian values” such as being concerned about the state of freedom. The poll claims these attitudes “could be associated with intolerance.”
“There is a risk that people who hold these views will resist to federal government messaging around equity and respect for 2SLGBTQI+ communities,” wrote the survey.
A total of 62% of Canadians said they were “concerned about the values children are learning,” and 61% held “conspiratorial beliefs” like “the idea that information about the Government of Canada is being hidden from the public.”
Meanwhile, 52% expressed “libertarian values saying that they are concerned about the loss of liberties and freedoms in Canada.”
The poll also discovered that Canada had the same number of “diversity valuers” (19%) as “opponents” to diversity issues (19%).
“Increasing the tolerance among this group for people in 2SLGBTQI+ communities would be ideal, but the low trust and overall anti-government stance may make this group hard to reach. Additionally, they may be unreceptive to the message,” wrote pollsters.
A vast majority of those polled (78%) believed that Canada was a good place to live for equity-seeking groups like the LGBTQ community. The same number of people also said that diversity was one of the country’s best qualities.
Additionally, 72% of Canadians were familiar with LGBTQ issues and 76% expressed comfort when around members of the LGBTQ community.
The poll also claimed that 58% of Canadians were comfortable with performances by drag artists such as drag queen story times.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently lectured Muslim parents who were concerned about gender ideology in schools, claiming that they were victims of the “American right wing.”
“First of all, there is an awful lot of misinformation and disinformation out there,” said Trudeau.
“People on social media, particularly fuelled by the American right wing, are spreading a lot of untruths about what’s actually in the provincial curriculum.”
Muslim educator Bahira Abdulsalam says a Windsor elementary school teacher’s tirade against Muslim students who abstained from the school’s pride day was hurtful.
In the recording exclusively obtained by True North, a teacher at Northwood Public School tells her class the Muslim students’ abstention over religious reasons was “disgusting” and “an incredible show of hatred” that made her not want to be their educator.
EXCLUSIVE: An elementary teacher in Windsor, Ontario berated Muslim students for skipping LGBTQ pride day, telling them their abstention was “disgusting” and “an incredible show of hatred” that makes her not want to be their educator. Recording obtained by @TrueNorthCentre. pic.twitter.com/T7jhFfLHvN
The incident took place amid reports of a very high absence rate at the school on its pride day. According to Life Site News, approximately 600 out of the school’s 800 students stayed home – a 75% absentee rate.
In an interview with True North, Abdulsalam said the incident was “so hurtful” and shows Canadians need to re-evaluate the criteria of selecting their educators.
Abdulsalam is an educator and scholar from Toronto, Ontario. She currently sits on the Toronto District School Board’s Parent Involvement Advisory Committee. She also ran for mayor in the 2023 mayoral by-election
In the recording, the teacher also condemns the Muslim students after they tell her they can’t change their religion to have it support LGBTQ lifestyles, and instructs the students to challenge their parents’ beliefs.
“Those kids, they will get confused. They have a certain identity at home and at school they are asked to change their identity,” said Abdulsalam.
She believes the teacher was “trying to make a disconnection between kids and their parents,” when she indicated that views held by Muslim parents are old-fashioned and ought to be challenged.
Abdulsalam, who has participated in protests against gender ideology in recent weeks, says Muslims are not against LGBTQ people, but oppose the teaching of gender ideology in schools.
“We don’t have any problem with them,” she said. “We are caring about our children, and we don’t want them to get the LGBT ideology.”
“There is a real problem in our schools… where they are taking an extreme side of the LGBT.” She says the latter is “not only in the sex education class, it is in all the signs in schools and all the environment.”
She also said that Muslims are not against the idea of sex education – but believe the latter must be age appropriate and take into account people’s moral views about sex.
“There are some principles and some ways of teaching sex principles that are aligned with our religion,” she said. “(But) we don’t want the students or our children at a very early (age) to (receive) sex education.”
Abdulsalam believes there needs to be more transparency around sex education, and that schools should give parents access to the sex-ed materials before they are taught to students in class.
A Leger poll commissioned by SecondStreet.org echoed Abdulsalam’s belief and found that 47% of Canadians believe schools should allow parents to view sensitive gender identity materials before they are taught to kids. Just 31% disagreed.
Abdulsalam also said parents must have the option to opt-out their kids from sex-ed – an option the Ontario government currently offers to parents.
The Greater Essex County District School Board (GECDSB) issued a statement in response to the incident at Northwood, in which it said the incident “is being addressed internally.”
A recent survey by Research Co reveals 30% of Canadians consider Justin Trudeau the worst prime minister of the last 55 years. Do you agree?
Plus, the Greater Essex County District School Board has issued a statement in response to one of its teachers being caught on tape berating Muslim students for skipping an LGBTQ pride day.
Also, could Canada be heading for another heated trade dispute with our neighbours to the south?
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Elie Cantin-Nantel!
Like father like son? Not when it comes to Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his enfant le plus âgé, Justin Trudeau.
They are at opposite ends of the polls — with Pierre considered the most popular prime minister of recent times, and Justin the worst prime minister of the last 55 years.
A survey conducted by Research Co. found 30% of Canadians believe the current prime minister is the worst among recent PMs, while his predecessor Stephen Harper comes in second at 18%.
But it wasn’t even close.
In addition, 20% of surveyed Canadians believe that Pierre Trudeau has been the best prime minister since 1968, marking a one-point increase compared to a similar survey conducted in June 2022.
On the other hand, 11% of Canadians said the same thing about Justin Trudeau.
From first to worst?
1. Pierre Trudeau – 20%;
2. Stephen Harper – 17%;
3. Jean Chrétien – 11%;
4. Justin Trudeau – 11%;
5. Brian Mulroney – 8%;
6. Paul Martin – 3%;
7. Joe Clark – 2%;
8. John Turner – 1%;
9. Kim Campbell – 1%.
The least popular PMs, from top to bottom:
1. Justin Trudeau – 30%;
2. Stephen Harper – 18%;
3. Kim Campbell – 7%;
4. Brian Mulroney – 6%;
5. Pierre Trudeau – 5%;
6. Jean Chrétien – 3%;
7. Joe Clark – 3%
8. Paul Martin – 2%;
9. John Turner – 1%.
The survey also found that despite being considered the worst by 18% of Canadians, 17% of Canadians consider Harper the best, and his popularity is much higher in Alberta.
“More than a third of Albertans (36%) believe Stephen Harper has been Canada’s best recent prime minister,” Research Co. president Mario Canseco said in a Friday press release. “Pierre Trudeau fares best in British Columbia (27%), Ontario (23%) and Atlantic Canada (22%).”
When it comes to Atlantic Canadians, 32% ranked Harper the worst recent head of government while, in Alberta, Justin Trudeau’s negative rating reaches 45%, while it’s 36% in British Columbia and 36% in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
In the context of leaders of the Official Opposition, the late Jack Layton is remembered well. Some 48% of Canadians believe the former NDP leader would have made a “good” or “very good” prime minister, a sentiment echoed by 61% of respondents aged 55 and over.
On top of that, five former leaders of the opposition were reviewed positively by more than one-in-five Canadians: ex-Reform Party leader Preston Manning (28%), former Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield (27%), former NDP leader Tom Mulcair (also 27%), as well as former Conservative leaders Andrew Scheer (22%) and Erin O’Toole (also 22%).
If only Stanfield had not dropped the football . . .
The ratings were lower for former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff (19%), former Alliance leader Stockwell Day (also 19%), former interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose (18%) and former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion (also 18%).
Different polls, different results.
According to a recent survey by Angus Reid, Trudeau’s approval rate at the eight-year mark sits four points higher than former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s approval rate, as well as eight points higher than his father Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
Angus Reid noted that several events this spring may have impacted Trudeau’s approval rate, such as the “launching of an investigation into foreign election interference, scrutiny over a $160,000 vacation to Jamaica, a divisive budget re-forecast, and the leaking of an admission that Canada will likely never meet its NATO obligations.”
Then again, it could be none of the above.
As former US President Barack Obama once noted, “If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.”
British Columbia remains steadfast in its commitment to upholding the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, despite facing numerous legal challenges. In 2022, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms initiated a legal challenge aiming to eliminate the requirements entirely, which will be heard in November. JCCF lawyer Charlene Le Beau joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the case and the implications it could have on individual rights and healthcare system integrity.
Justin Trudeau has positioned himself in a contentious spot, caught between gender ideology and the concerns of Muslim parents. As the debate over educational curriculum grows, Muslim families have united with other faith-based and non-faith groups to rally against growing threats to parental rights. RightNow co-founder Alissa Golob joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss how this controversial issue has managed to garner consensus amongst vastly diverse groups in Canadian society.
